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The New-England Primer
Books containing more than 70 pages, used for primary education. The texts were comprehensive and thought to include the primary essentials for one's spiritual life. -
A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, Comprising an Easy, Concise, and Systematic Method of Education, Designed for Use of English Schools in America
During the American Revolution, the people no longer considered materials printed in England to be appropriate. Noah Webster designed the nation's new speller, which was the first to be published in America. It had three parts: spelling, grammer, and essays for reading. Written and Published by Noah Webster. -
Noah Webster
Used his own money to publish America's first speller. -
Horace Mann
believed America's reading material was meaningless and criticized old spelling books. -
Leveled Readers Baed on Difficulty
Educators created a series of readers which were leveled based on difficulty. They included resources for teachers such as prereading activities, comprehension questions, and interesting stories for beginning readers. -
Samuel Worcester
published the Primer of the English Language-later sued McGuffey for plagiarism and won. -
Words Presented as Wholes
Educators began experimenting with presenting words as wholes. They believed children learned from whole to part, rather than part to whole. Children were introduced to whole words with pictures, which were words already in their apeaking vocabulary. -
William Holmes McGuffey
Wrote and published a new type of reader called the Eclectic series-later it was discovered that McGuffey borrowed much of his work from Samual Worcester. He was sued for $2,000 in 1838. -
Isaac Pitman
advocated, created, and published a new phonetic alphabet -
The First Phonetic Alphabet
used to aid spelling skills -
George Watt
a phonetic expert who created an alphabet with one-to-one sound symbol correspondence called the Deseret alphabet -
The Deseret Series of Readers
used in the Utah Public Schools to teach beginning reading-later discontinued mostly because of its extreme differences from the traditional alphabet which caused confusion -
Colonel Francis Parker
promoted the importance of meaning and understanding in the beginning stages of reading instruction -
Ellen Cyr
the first author to create a series with eight books and the first American woman with a widely sold series marketed under her name -
George Farnham
promoted the importance of meaning and understanding in the beginning stages of reading instruction-created The Sentence Method of Reading -
Sentence-Method and Story-Method
The teacher presents a story one sentence at a time through questioning and illustrations. -
Text Including Diacritical Marks
Diacritical marks showed the pronounciation of letters. Diacritical marks were added to text instead of reforming the alphabet again. -
Edward G. Ward
former superintendent of schools in Brooklyn, New York-created a set of readers that used diacritical marks. "The Little Red Hen" and other fables were included in the readers. -
Charles Eliot Norton
wrote "The Heart of Oak" books- believed that choice of content, not methodology, was the essential element in teaching beginning readers -
Ellen Cyr's Series Translated
series translated into Spanish, Japanese, and Braille and was adopted by California to be used as the state's reading series -
Rudolf Flesch
wrote the book "Why Johnny Can't Read and What You Can Do About It"- Flesch challenged the word method of teaching reading, describing it as one in which words are learned throught repetition. His solution to the problem was to teach phonics. -
Teachers Applying Whole Language
Missouri teachers formed the first support group of the whole language approach to reading. -
A Whole Language Comprehension-Centered Reading Curriculum
Ken Goodman further developed the concept of Whole Language reading and believed phonics and word advocates missed how readers develop meaning from language. -
Whole Language Politicized
California State Superintendent adopted a skills-based reading program where quality literature was the main focus. However, the students scored near the bottom on National assessments causing the nation to percieve the decline as a direct result of whole language instruction methods.
